A computer server is accessible on a network at its uniquely-assigned internet protocol (IP) address. As IP addresses as not easy for a computer user to remember, computer users may access a computer server via a unique plain text American Standard Code for Information Interchange (“ASCII”) domain name that is associated with the computer server's IP address. Each domain name has multiple components, separated by a period “.”. The right-most portion of the domain name indicates the top-level domain of the domain name (e.g. “.com”, “.net”, “.org”, “.ca”). Portions of the domain name appearing to the left of the top-level domain name indicate the subdomains of the top-level domain. For example, in the domain name www.examplename.com, “.com” is the top-level domain, “examplename” is a subdomain of the “.com” top-level domain, and “www” is a subdomain of “examplename.com”.
Domain name authorities currently limit domain names to characters that are selected from ASCII letters “A-Z”, numeric digits “0-9”, and hyphens “-” (i.e. “LDH” characters). However, for marketing, branding, or other reasons, a web site owner might want to have its web site associated with a domain name that contains one or more non-LDH characters.